George Clooney and Grant Heslov have moved their production company, Smokehouse Pictures, from Warner Brothers to Sony which feels like a very odd move considering Sony is generally all about mainstream movies and dumping smaller projects like, “Moneyball,” and Warner Bros. is perhaps the most daring studio of 2009 having already released challenging and difficult films like, “Watchmen,” and “Observe & Report,” not to mention spent millions helping Spike Jonze realize his expensive vision for “Where The Wild Thins Are.”
The two still have a plethora of projects in development at the studio but will now forth be working at Sony. Heslov recently made his directorial debut helming Clooney in “The Men Who Stare At Goats” which will likely see a release sometime in the fall. They must have hit it off, but we still yearn for the Section 8 partnership of Clooney and Steven Soderbergh that yielded some great indies (“Insomnia,” “Syriana,” “A Scanner Darkly” and “Michael Clayton”), but sadly shut down at the end of 2006 when the filmmaker wanted to focus on directing again.
Then again, “Good Night, And Good Luck,” which Clooney directed, was a Section 8 film produced and written by Heslov so hopefully that’s a strong indication that the quality will remain.
Under their aegis, Smokehouse has projects like the legal drama “The Challenge,” penned by Aaron Sorkin (go Facebook! go!) on the go, a John Grisham adaptation “The Innocent Man” (which David Gordon Green was once attached to), and “The Tourist,” a project that Tom Cruise was circling earlier this year, among several others. [Variety]
